Actual RPG month: Witcher 2

There are only a handful of gaming thoughts I have that come to mind from 2012. Stuff like "I wish homm games didn't suck now" and "I wish I could still enjoy Final Fantasy games" come to mind every year. But 2012 is a year of many new games for me, but not many memorable games.

First one is probably damn, seriously, every shooterish game I play I miss the vivisecting, the UI and the crumbs button from Dead Space. Most games would legitimately be improved by a more integrated UI that feels more natural, and blowing legs off things is always cool. I think that sort of gunplay was in RAGE and Fallout, but never as well done. The crumbs button itself remains something I miss every time though, in every game. I'm not saying I need a button to tell me exactly where to go all the time, but if you're going to say 'go to such an such a place' a route or maybe just something that spins me in the right direction would be so very nicely....

Second one is, god DLC is annoying. Why isn't DLC just always something naturally added to the game? I want to get ME3 this year, and I don't want to pirate it, but I seriously shouldn't have to go through a fucking circus to get the DLC running. I looked at ME2's DLC and it was like, blah blah, bioware bux forum this EA login that and I was like fucking whatever.

Third one, I really wanted to play Witcher 2. And here we are.

Witcher 2 is neat for many reasons. I liked the Witcher for, in order of things I like: the atmosphere, the setting, the truly grey morality, the potion system, the characters I liked, the fact the main character actually had sex, the combat and the characters I didn't like. There is, for future reference, a difference between genuine human sexuality and that weird hundred year old librarian virgin thing in Mass Effect. The Witcher was yeah, a little sexist kinda, but at least it was an honest and earnest portrayal of a manwhore. It is a portrayal of euro-centric style middle ages, which is like the apex predator king of all sexists, the sexism that walks like a monster truck. All of these I expected moving forward, but the Witcher 2 also brings up its game with a gorgeous engine.

It is just so awesome that a company that doesn't have a bajillion dollars can be completely successful beyond the "indie" scope and produce a game that looks triple A. And it got ported to consoles, or at least, the Xbox360. So I fired the game up after finishing Fallout 3, watching the gorgeous intro and started the tutorial.

Took me about ten minutes to hit a bug in the tutorial. God. Fucking. Damn it. PC gaming!

Skipped the tutorial and headed right into the game, and damn it, witcher 2. Game starts with a very restrained prologue much like the first game - I guess that's fine. Then it spits me out into a stealth section. I'd say vomit, but vomit is the acting of expelling isn't it? The controls are not great, but the rest of the game doesn't need quite so precision movement and while this really does, it is one horrible bit of queasiness then you're off to the races. There are later stealth scenes, but they worked a little better than this one.

And then cutscenes. Then more cutscenes. Then a map cutscene. Before that, you die. Then you do a cutscene again, remember to save, then you die again. Then the game slow rolls your death reload as Geralt slowly crumbles to the floor

It's almost off the bat like the game doesn't want you to like it. You die. And then you die. Then you die again, and again, and again. One of my friends is a Valve employee and Valve employees get all of the games on steam on their Valve account. I look at gaming introductions like this and I think about his account - If I had his account, I would not play this game. Seriously! With nothing invested I would say fuck your buggy tutorial and your confusing combat, I'll go try one of the other bajillion games.

The thing the tutorial bugged out on was a talent a couple hours into the game I still don't have. Admittedly if I wasn't dying I think I'm all of ... maybe twenty minutes in? Yeesh, well probably not but it feels like that. Apparently the talents are locked until I spend enough in the one talent tree, but it doesn't tell me this. The game has serious issues when it comes to telling you what is going on. Do you like QTEs where the prompt disappears if you happen to do ... Something? Fuck if I know, but on the first boss I almost did it without looking it up, except that I never saw the prompt and died. I died a couple more times before checking what I was doing wrong.

does look awesome though

Look, I did WoW end game stuff. I did bosses that took 50 hours to finish and were hard every week. It's fine! I like a challenge! Or used to. Maybe I don't like one anymore, or at least a QTE I never see. Ugh.

Also, again, no. No game designers. Do not put cutscenes after I can save. I don't care if there's a skip button. Seriously, honestly, as deeply as I can convey this - Do these people not play games? I can't code for shit. No capacity whatsoever. I'm not trying to say I could do a better job. But I am so fucking entirely baffled. Cutscene, then save point, then boss battle. Why is this so hard? What is going on, what possible reason is there? I don't want to load it more than once.

I also don't understand why they fucked with the potion system. I can set a snare trap in combat, but not quaff a potion? They were already limited by the potion toxicity - A great idea, and one I would literally steal or hope to see put in every fantasy game forever. The game still has potion toxicity, but you can only drink potions within the meditation system. This often means that, assuming you're not alt-tabbing to follow a guide, you'll be thrust into a boss fight where you were supposed to drink a potion at a specific point before the battle and have to reload the previous saves til you figure out which particular moment the potion duration won't tick out from. (Though, to be honest, why is potion duration so short? You can just rebuy on any given potion pretty cheaply, so it's just an unnecessary hassle to keep them up) Then it's back to shooting hops and hanging out at cutscene school.

They fix it for the next boss fight, except that boss lands blows on you sometimes while you're loading. I ... like, what? Did you test this at all? That's amateur level. That's something out of a mario rom hack where you fall through the world right off the bat. I just can't ... It just blows my mind. How could you possibly put that in a game? Then the boss puts up an invincibility shield. Or something? It looks like one, and I can't tell if it is or isn't. Then he stuns you and throws a bomb at you.

Is this game serious?

My favorite part of the Witcher remains Geralt; the voice actor is excellent, but his attitude is suitable. Unlike say, Shepard, the character works when pushed somewhere "good" or "evil". He's an ends justifies the means sort of guy, but a decent one, so either end of the spectrum never feels too far from his personality. The voice acting and writing for Geralt remain good - Quirky, in bits, but that's an issue with the way scripts branch out. This is one area where I'm willing to cut a game slack, since it's tons and tons of dialogue that all flows together.

I admit I wasn't too impressed with the "morality choice" that governs how you enter the second chapter of the game - Not to spoil it, but it comes off as a kinda loaded question that a decent person would probably always go with Answer A to. It ends up, again, feeling like you're supposed to be reading a guide so you know for certain that's how you go through a different path in Chapter 2. Still, you have to admire the willingness to have discrete paths through the game. Does Mass Effect do anything like that? You can paragon or renegade at random through that game, often by fucking accident. In fact I seem to recall just answering questions honestly broke my character in ME2 and I wasn't allowed to be a "full paragon" because I made too many burning old people house jokes. Geralt, still, feels like someone who would hedge the line. Geralt is never going to be a "full paragon".

The engine is really attractive and well made. Not only is the engine good, but the environments are interesting, detailed and have a very natural feel to them. Environments are too small in many parts with a rather cramped in feeling, but otherwise feel great. I know it's sort of an odd thing to comment on, but say if you take a game like WoW the environments feel "put together" and not natural. A path was set down and the game constructed, like an artificial structure, around it. The Witcher 2 doesn't feel like that, it feels natural and smooth. You get lost in the Dwarf town but you feel like you're getting down the layout of a new neighborhood, not fighting against a confusing artificial mess. My only real complaint about the graphics and environments is the "ledge" system. The ledges are rather arbitrary, and look so natural in the terrain you don't necessarily notice where you're supposed to leap up or down.

The music too, man the music is really good. It reminds me often of either Heroes of Might and Magic music, or maybe King's Bounty music. The two sort of run together in my head, but whatever, it reminds me of games like that and that music is good! Lots of variety to it, lots of different tracks that match up nicely with where you are. There's a track that plays in the haunted areas of chapter 2 and man, it's so good! Usually I can't even remember tracks at all, other than remembering the music in Crysis 2 and Sol Survivor was quite good.

The story is ... Strange, I guess. I mean strange past the fact Geralt is sort of a darker mutant Conan character in a grey medieval nightmare world loaded with anachronisms. It suffers a little for being between two games it needs to vaguely but not quite tie together. It suffers a bit more for having a very broken and diverse set of outcomes. There's a ton of choices in the game that have different impacts and outcomes ... But my problem is, to be honest, I don't really want to go through the game four or five times to figure things out. It's a little bit too diverse and kinda loses itself. There was a moment in the last stretch of the game where I realized what the main quest was and how far off track we'd gotten from it and just like, sighed. They dump dialogue in the epilogue to explain the main plot and ... ugh.

The writing is good and the dialogue is delivered well, it just feels a bit messy and off track. I mean I really appreciate the idea that you can make a choice and the results of that choice will show up 4 hours later, changing the game in a way you might not notice. That's awesome. What isn't awesome is just how splintered the plot can come off as. It's just a bit too ambitious, and too winding. I like the story and the mystery is great. I don't like that it wanders off for about half the playing time.

Combat is such a mixed bag. People told me it was vastly improved and very different from the first game, and in turn it ... Just doesn't feel different. The 'stab in the back' mechanic is horrendous, and beyond that I didn't feel like it was immensely different from the first Witcher game. One thing I do love is the ctrl menu - You hit ctrl to change your quick selects, and then the game slows down as you make your choice. It doesn't pause entirely, but it's a great compromise between the unnaturalness of making a UI selection in combat and totally pausing the game to do it which also feels unnatural. I like the way you can flip between bombs (which I never used in the first game), daggers and traps. What I don't understand is why you can't use potions in combat.

Potion toxicity limits how much you can tak!. You couldn't slam potions if you wanted to, there's a pretty hard ceiling on them. You can set a bear trap on the battlefield as an enemy is rushing towards you but you can't heal or drink a Swallow. I can't complain about this enough.

On the other hand, If I were to offer to the devs ways to make this into the great game it should have been, I would suggest they rework the potion system -if nothing else there is literally no reason whatsoever to make potion durations as stupidly low as they are, you ALWAYS have the materials for every single potion you need - and healing itself, as well as removing the stupid "Stab in the back!" combat thing if they're going to have Geralt randomly dash forward every time you swing the sword. The mechanic would be fine if you didn't spend most fights struggling to keep Geralt from forcing himself into being outflanked. I mean seriously he just decides he wants to be "over there now!" and does some rolling leap into another enemy. Then you get backstabbed and struggle to not die. Also, the game presents Geralt with various books and what not which are supposed to "Explain" monsters. But they're all just meaningless flavor text rather than explaining how to fight things. I mean the text is there, write some more, puts some witcher written diagrams in. If you gave me clues and suggestions on how to fight the bosses I'd probably have found them a bit better. I really liked the book mechanic in the first game and I was disappointed to see it watered down.
   

not as awesome as it looks, but that's tough

The last thing is ... The boss fights are mostly boring. I mentioned a while back that tension is along the same spectrum as boredom; eventually, being tense becomes dull and you lose interest. Most, though not all, of the boss fights are simply dull tedium that I googled just skipping. The one boss fight has a "break" that you're autosaved at in your previous condition. The boss hits like a truck, so your best choice - as best I can tell - is to get up from your keyboard.

Yes. Seriously! Get up from your keyboard and wait while your health regenerates and you can rebuy on your potion timers. In the first game there was a cleanse potion; removing all potion effects and toxicity. For some reason they took it out and I have no idea why. I looked for it. Did I miss it? So you just go afk for a couple minutes. You can go back and reload an earlier save, drink the potion loadout RIGHT at the last moment then speed click through the dialogue so you can have the remaining duration and I just can't fathom why they thought tedium like that was a good idea.

I honestly can't recommend the Witcher 2, which is sort of a bummer. The game is out and out frustrating at time, in ways I wasn't especially impressed with. The main characters - Geralt, Letho, Dandelion, Triss and Zoltan - are all great characters, well voiced and fun. The dwarf town in chapter 2 was the high point of the game for me, with a surprisingly good sense of fun and immersion as you prepare for war. But the floaty combat, irritating changes to the potion system and general tedium really get in the way.

On the other hand if you read that and go, doesn't sound that bad, behind those flaws lies a beautiful engine, excellent sound work and a great if unfocused story with tons of player choices that all feel in tune with the story. If it's a complex story you're after, though, you won't see many better in my experience.